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There are many metrics that are easy to measure when it comes to content marketing: pageviews, time on site, bounce rate, etc. But when it comes to lead generation, proving attribution and ROI on your content is tough. And we’re not talking about overcooked beef tough. What we’re talking about here is more like bringing Matt Damon home from Mars tough.
But fear not – there’s a readily available tool in your marketing toolbox right now that can help you track attribution from your content easily, quickly, and with actionable results!
What I’m talking about is a powerful, but often underused tool in Google Analytics called Assisted Conversions.
So hold on tight, it’s about to get attribution-y in here....
Too often marketers talk about activities instead of outcomes—for example, how many campaigns they ran, how many trade shows they participated in, how many new names they added to the lead database. These are metrics that reinforce the perception that marketing is a cost center, not a revenue driver.
To change that perception, marketers need to start talking about how their programs impact the whole sales process, with revenue being the core focus.
Instead of seeing marketing activities in isolation, marketers need an end-to-end view of buyer engagement. It’s not about the first “touch” that brings a prospect into the sales funnel, or the last “touch” before signing a deal. It’s about tracking all the touch points at which a prospect connects with your marketing programs, and measuring those multi-touch impacts.
So how do you do it? Here are four marketing analytics for demonstrating marketing’s ability to drive revenue:...
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the information at our fingertips and get distracted by vanity metrics. Be honest, is page views really the most important thing for you to look at?)
So what should we be paying attention to? Which metrics matter more than others? And how do you measure the true business impact of your content?
Ultimately, it’s about the bottom line. All of the traffic in the world doesn’t mean much if you aren’t getting any new customers out of it.
Here’s a roundup of the core metrics that content marketers should keep an eye on if they want to know whether their content marketing is truly paying off....
The single biggest challenge both communications professionals and the business leaders they answer to have to overcome is understanding business metrics. There are generally two kinds: Those related to revenue and those related to intangibles. When you’re measuring revenue, you can calculate return on investment (ROI). When you’re not measuring revenue, you can’t.
Yet both communications professionals and their managers somehow still think it’s okay to hold us to ROI standards for any and all business objectives.The manifestation of this conflict reared its confusing head last week in an article by Jonathan Rick that made its way to CMO.com. The piece appeared to be about measuring ROI in communications. Unfortunately, none of the metrics he discussed had anything to do with revenue....
... Unfortunately, that’s the wrong question. If there’s anything all that chaos and competition of the past five years should have taught agencies, it’s that too much “creativity” celebrated by marketers and advertisers really isn’t. Advertising creativity has long been a bit of a con job; the media world is filled with costly creative that neither builds brands nor sells products. The better argument is that traditional advertising and marketing firms have pathologically overinvested in creativity while consistently underinvesting in meaningful metrics. An even better case might be made that the multimedia successes of Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and so on, highlight just how flaccid and ineffective most creative advertising and market work has been. What’s the secret sauce these technologies all have in common? Their creativity is measurable, trackable, and accountable. That’s a winning combination. If you’re a brand manager or CMO, that’s what you should care about....
Learn how successful marketers from big brands measure social media ROI in this blog post from the TopRank Online Marketing Blog.
... What Are The Top 3 Data Points That You Measure?
Lewis: Cost per impression and cost per conversion are the two main metrics that we measure because we want to know how we’re impacting awareness. We also want to know how social is influencing the customer journey and where the social touch points occur along the marketing funnel.
Nick: We measure cost per impression, cost per engagement, pipeline touch, and response time. We regularly send the C-suite a simple report and only show them detailed statistics if they have questions. We found that it was best to make the report simple and easy for people to digest.
Scott: We primarily measure social ROI by net promoter score and customer satisfaction score. (Net Promoter Score, or NPS is how likely are you to refer our company on a scale from 1 to 10.)
We measure NPS because the top of funnel stuff is squishier. The metaphor that we use is that we want to use social media to pass the customer the ball so that they can pass it through the funnel. We also want to know where the customer first touched us in their conversion journey and track them all the way through....
To see big wins in e-commerce today, entrepreneurs need to cover all of their bases, from organic SEO to mobile advertising.
Analytics tools can create a pretty detailed snapshot of where your business stands — too detailed, in some cases.
Curious about which metrics really matter, we asked a panel of successful e-commerce entrepreneurs which pieces of data they measure regularly and what it tells them about their overall strategy. Their best answers are below....
A recent study shows Twitter outperforms LinkedIn and Facebook 9 to 1 for lead generation. For B2B marketers, that's a big deal. Here's a quick guide on getting the most out of your Twitter for lead gen campaign.
Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are on a meteoric rise, and so are social data. Here are five insights social data can provide for businesses.... With social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook on a meteoric rise, companies are beginning to incorporate data collected from these social sites and their users into many aspects of their business from marketing to internal Human Resources issues – and with good reason. The sheer volume of social media data makes it incredibly difficult to analyze. However, various data services are popping up to answer the challenge of making sense of all this potentially advantageous consumer information. Here are five insights social data can provide for businesses....
Discover how social marketing tools like Commun.it, BlogDash and Traackr can help you identify, connect with and engage industry influencers.... This month, we learned that although 65% of brands participate in influencer marketing, just 10% of total digital marketing spend goes to social, which includes influencer marketing. Some have cried, don’t people see the opportunity? Why aren’t they spending on influencers! Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report shared the above insight, as well as the fact that a mere 6% of social spend is allotted to marketing to influencers. This doesn’t signal a problem to me at all. In fact, it’s an indication that while influencer marketing is recognized as a valuable piece of the online marketing puzzle and many practice it, it doesn’t require a great deal of budget to accomplish. That, friends, is what we call an opportunity. That’s not to say influencer outreach is easy, but that an array of low-cost tools are available to help marketers better identify, understand and connect with industry influencers. These social tools enable us to automate much of the research, to weed through a mass of data and identify trends or common characteristics among the people who can positively impact our business with a tweet, a blog post, or a thoughtful comment. Check out these social tools for brand marketers looking to more easily and inexpensively measure and act on influence in their industry....
The problem with social media ROI... While Social Media treats ROI as a mostly mythical creature that people like to read about in hypothetical scenarios, real-life companies are struggling to actually track the ROI of their social media marketing efforts. Consider these statistics that NectarOm (Nectar Online Media) published in a recent study in collaboration with the Socia Media Clubs: Out of 400 people surveyed, 73% do not even track the ROI of their social media efforts. Of the people who do attempt to track the ROI of their social media marketing efforts, 46% said it was not a major driver of revenue. Let’s think about this in the context of the InfiniGraph e-book. They suggest that a single campaign may involve a company spending $5,000 in Facebook ads. Based on the NectarOM study, most companies would not even make an effort to track the return on that $5,000. The companies that would track the investment would, for the most part, find that their ROI was poor return....
...The point is that companies spanning different industries have recognized the apparent worth of maintaining social media channels. And a new study titled, “The Social Media Payoff: Establishing the Missing Link Between Social Media and ROI” reveals the potential monetary value of these channels. Research, conducted by LoyaltyOne, Medill and the Ivey Business School, indicates that consumer social media engagement with brands does in fact lead to increased sales. The study, based on a 2-year analysis of consumers in Canada’s AIR MILES Reward Program (10 million members), shows that those who participated in program-related social media events increased their purchases from AIR MILES businesses by 15-30 percent over non-participants.... [Social payback ~ Jeff]
Is your company offering customers a fast track through social media? Can customers who complain via Twitter or other online channels get better, faster service than those who wait in the phone queue? Stop it. Shouldn’t you treat all your customers the same way? Listening to Social Feedback
Business in general does a terrible job of listening to social feedback. According to Satmatrix, 55% of companies ignore customers who provide feedback via social media. In fact, that’s why I challenge companies to take the “Twitter Test” to see how they are performing in this area. Some companies get it and are working hard to integrate social channels into their support systems. Suzanne Kapner wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal article about Citibank’s efforts to improve response to customer issues raised through social media.... [Here's a thoughtful reflection on customer service and social media. ~ Jeff]
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“Measuring KPIs depends hugely on the client and their specific goals,” says Mangiaforte. “We also go deeper for clients, identifying and reporting on the number of influencers who participate in campaigns and breaking down their demographics to give our clients an enormous amount of intelligence about their social audience.” She completes this measurement through a mix of proprietary software and tools such as Keyhole and on-platform analytics, using this assortment of tools to, “identify influencers and measure their impact in terms of reach and engagement once we deploy them for our clients.”
It is important to consider the big picture when choosing the specific data to collect. Ask yourself, does this directly contribute to my company’s bottom line? How can we correlate brand awareness to lead generation or conversions? Once you have taken a step back to establish priorities, you can take a deeper, more informed dive into the data that matters most – ultimately, benefitting you and your team. Collecting data points for data’s sake isn’t going to solve anything....
In other words, legacy brands do have a leg up on smaller retailers when it comes to ecommerce and it’s in the amount of intelligence they are using to drive conversions and increase revenue.
That said, data and analytics should be democratized throughout the ecommerce space, and no, Google Analytics isn’t enough. Your big box competitors aren’t simply monitoring new and repeat visitors, or from where their web traffic comes. No, they are using enhanced ecommerce analytics to push visitors down a purchase funnel from the moment they land on the site.
Below, the top metrics these retailers are using and how you should be using them, too....
Of course we don’t want you to destroy your career. But if you were truly hell-bent on it, we know just how to do it.Don’t measure ROI. Seriously, don’t. Only good things happen when you do.
According to the 2014 State of Inbound survey, marketers that measure ROI are 12X more likely to generate a greater return year-over-year than a lower return. In other words, simply the act of measuring ROI correlates with positive results....
Metrics & ROI - Everyone seems to be talking about Big Data these days, but how many marketers really understand its potential and limitations? Here's a look at two big misconceptions regarding Big Data.
Among the misconceptions regarding Big Data, two important ones stand out: that correlations alone suffice and that Big Data means sampling bias is no longer an issue.
Fooled by AssociationFirst, Big Data mining advocates claim that correlations suffice and the quest for causal interpretation should be abandoned. The real danger is that you will be "fooled by association," as explained in Freakonomics....
Learn how to calculate customer lifetime value. CLV stands for customer lifetime value and it’s simply the value that a customer contributes to your business over the entire lifetime at your company.
Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) asked some 150 CEOs about the trends they expected to be prevalent in the coming years as part of their 17th Annual CEO survey and found most bets were on technology. Some 86% of CEOs cited tech advances as the dominant global trend. But marketers beware! When it came to how well prepared their organizations are to capitalize on these transformative trends, only 36% of the CEOs surveyed considered that their corporate marketing capabilities were up to speed and ready to embrace change.
According to the report, more than half of the CEOs responding were planning to change their customer growth and retention strategies to address the situation. The next few years are likely to see a new kind of interaction with customers as organizations acknowledge how technological advances are changing their relationships with consumers.
The emphasis will no longer be on the single transaction—instead, the focus is shifting to a more sustainable “always on” relationship with customers. It’s what we’ve been preaching for longer than I can remember and it’s nice to see, even in a small study, that this mindset is catching on....
The Starbucks Coffee marketing research department is kept busy providing oodles and oodles of insights into the Starbucks brand through yearly brand audits. And take it from this former long-time Starbucks marketer: The company learns a lot from these studies.
However, when it comes to measuring and managing the Starbucks brand on a daily basis, the Starbucks marketing department generally relies on a much simpler method—a brand checkbook.
Just as your personal checkbook has credits and debits, a brand checkbook has credits and debits in the form of brand credits and brand debits. "Brand credits" are business activities that enhance the reputation and perception people have of a brand, and "brand debits" are those that detract from the reputation and perception of the brand....
From obsessing about real-time data to buying advertising based on ad impressions/page views to celebrating Likes, learn how to avoid eight common mistakes.... I'll expand my purview a little bit in this post, from just looking at silly metrics to also looking at silly data "things." My hope is to use these eight examples to illustrate to you how, if you are spending 30% of your time with data, you can use crazy cool data strategies/metrics to ensure many, many promotions. Eight data things that marketing people believe that get them fired…. 1. Real-time data is life changing. 2. All you need to do is fix the bounce rate. 3. Number of Likes represents social awesomeness. 4. # 1 Search Results Ranking = SEO Success. 5. REDUCE MY CPC! REDUCE MY CPC NOW!! 6. Page views. Give me more page views, more and more and more! 7. Impressions. Go, get me some impressions stat! 8. Intent beats demographics and psychographics. Always....
At this point, online marketing and SEO are part of almost every business’s marketing budget. However, in order to make your online marketing efforts truly successful, you need to make sure you don’t limit how many customers you can reach. If you’re still holding back because you don’t know what to do, there are some basic tips that can get you in the game.....
Social media is full of numbers, but most of the time we don't use them in any actionable way. The reason is simple: Social metrics are often too complicated to understand, and they provide few clues on how we can improve our success. The reality is that the return on social media marketing can vary widely for each business. Some companies see quick and immediate returns, while others fail to see much of anything at all. What could the problem be? And, more important, how can we be sure that our business won't fail online? This article looks to answer those questions by offering a few quick-and-dirty methods for gauging your online marketing strengths and weaknesses....
Here are some top analytics to avoid when measuring marketing ROI and proving revenue.
I recently wrote about how to build a data-driven marketing team. But what metrics should that team track? There are literally hundreds if not thousands of possible marketing management metrics to choose from, and almost all of them measure something of some kind of value. The problem is that most of them relate very little to the revenue and profitability metrics that concern the CEO, CFO and the board....
Here are the top categories of metrics to avoid....
Did a Site-Wide Megafooter Increase Sales Conversions for This Luxury Bag Ecommerce Store? [This is a fun test for marketing and social marketing people ~ Jeff]
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Very useful guideline to setting up assisted conversions in your Google analytics account. It will give you ROI measurement capability.